No, the little guys don't get hit harder. It's a percentage. Same percentage. The richer players have more money to lose, but the percentages do not get larger the less you make.
What you saw was an NHL player being very, very bad at understanding basic math. Which is most of them. Players have historically been very, very stupid about what escrow is and how it's connected to the cap and league revenues, to the point where the NHLPA had to conduct seminars in recent years. The players used to always use the cap escalator thinking it gave them free money, but then complained about escrow got larger- because they had just voted to increase the cap well above the 50-50 split, requiring escrow to make up the difference.